The remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan said Sunday it was ready to transform itself from an absolute monarchy to democracy, with weekend mock polls hailed as a success.
   ‘The first of the two-phased mock elections was a great success and we are now ready to usher in democracy,’ Dasho Kunzang Wangdi, Bhutan’s chief election commissioner, said by telephone from the capital Thimphu.
   Saturday’s dummy elections were designed to familiarise residents of the ‘Land of the Thunder Dragon’, who have never had the chance to vote before, with the workings of parliamentary democracy.
   The exercise is part of a plan by former king Jigme Singye Wangchuck–who handed his crown to his young Oxford-educated son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, in December–to change with the times and assume a more ceremonial role.
   An estimated 400,000 people were eligible to vote in the tiny Buddhist nation, which is about the size of Switzerland and sits sandwiched between India and China. But turnout appeared low at about 30 per cent, with just 124,747 votes cast in the 47 constituencies.
   Voters were given a choice of four fictional parties–the Blue, Green, Red and Yellow Druk parties. The Druk, or Thunder Dragon, is the national symbol.
   Each party had a fictional platform: the Blue party stood for industrial development, the Greens for environmental protection, and the Red Druks for free and fair government.
   But it was the Yellow Druk party, which stood for ‘ensuring unity of the country through preservation of traditions, culture and values’ that appeared to be ahead in preliminary results, Wangdi said.
   The top two parties will go into a second round of dress rehearsal polls on May 28.
   Home to 600,000 people and known as a Shangri-la of stunning beauty, Bhutan’s transition to democracy began in 2001, when the hugely popular former king handed over the powers of daily government to a council of ministers.
   A 34-point draft constitution unveiled in 2004 has also been sent to the Bhuta0nese people for their views ahead of the 2008 polls. The constitution will replace a 1953 royal decree giving the monarch absolute power.

India on Sunday successfully tested a surface-to-surface version of the supersonic BrahMos cruise missile developed jointly with Russia, official sources said.
   ‘Sunday’s test was just routine. A user trial,’ a defence official said. The missile was last successfully tested on February 4.
   The missile was fired from a mobile launcher from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur-on-sea, 200 kilometres northeast of eastern Orissa state capital Bhubaneswar, official sources said.
   First tested in June 2001, the missile named after India’s Brahmaputra River and Russia’s Moskva River has a range of 290 kilometres and can carry a 300-kilogram conventional warhead.
   The eight-metre missile weighs about three metric tonnes and can be launched from land, ships, submarines or aircraft, travelling at a speed of up to Mach 28.
   Sunday’s test came just 10 days after India successfully tested the Agni-III, an intermediate-range missile that for the first time gives New Delhi a device capable of hitting targets inside China, including capital Beijing.
   The Indian army is set to start deploying the missile this year, the CEO of its manufacturer BrahMos Aerospace A. Sivathanu Pillai said last month.

Israeli troops killed eight Palestinians, including a 17-year-old girl, in a two-day surge of fighting across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said Sunday.
   The dead also included three militants travelling together in a car in the northern West Bank, and a man in Gaza killed in an Israeli airstrike in response to a Palestinian rocket attack.
   Israeli troops killed two Palestinian militants, including a top bombmaker, during an arrest raid early Sunday, Palestinian officials said. The Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a militant group linked to president Mahmoud Abbas’
   Fatah party, said the men were killed after Israeli troops surrounded a building where they were hiding and ordered people out. Most occupants came out, but the two militants remained holed up inside. An exchange of fire broke out, and the two men were killed, the group said.
   The group said the dead included Amin Lubadi, a bombmaker who had been wanted by the Israelis for more than three years.
   Palestinian medical officials confirmed the deaths of two men.
   Israeli officials said they were looking into the report. They defended the earlier operations as the latest steps in their ongoing war against Palestinian militants. But Palestinian officials said the bloodshed only hurt efforts to expand a cease-fire in Gaza to the West Bank.
   The fighting erupted early Saturday in the northern West Bank, an area known as a stronghold of militant groups.
   The three militants were killed as they travelled in the northern town of Jenin. Palestinian officials said the men were ambushed by undercover troops, while the army said its troops returned fire after the militants shot at them.

Military-ruled Thailand is bracing for political paralysis as crises loom over a new constitution and the fate of its main parties ahead of elections later this year, analysts said.
   The army-installed government was initially welcomed when the military ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra in a September coup, with the public hopeful for stability after months of street protests demanding his ouster.
   But the good feelings have faded as the government has come under increasing criticism over a number of policy miscues, including its economic management and an escalating insurgency in the kingdom’s Muslim-majority south.
   Anti-junta protests have become more frequent and allies of Thaksin–who has remained in self-exile abroad since the putsch–plan to rally against the government on Friday, with experts warning of bigger demonstrations ahead.
   ‘We are in a transitional period for Thai politics,’ said political analyst Panitan Wattanayagorn.
   ‘The political situation here in the next few months is very fragile and quite unstable,’ he said, citing uncertainty over Thailand’s two biggest political parties and the new constitution, drafted by a junta-appointed committee.
   The Constitutional Court is set to rule on vote fraud charges against Thaksin’s political party–Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) – and the country’s main opposition Democrat Party on May 30.
   If found guilty, the parties would be dissolved and the party executives banned from politics for five years, meaning prominent leaders could not run in December polls promised by the junta.
   Michael Nelson, politics lecturer at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said if an election went ahead after the dissolution of the parties, Thailand would likely be governed by minor political players.

Thousands of Kashmiris chanting pro-Pakistan slogans on Sunday attended a rally to welcome back a hardline separatist leader who underwent cancer treatment in Mumbai.
   Syed Ali Geelani, 72, heads the hardline faction of the region’s main separatist alliance, the Hurriyat Conference, which supports union with Pakistan.
   The ailing leader had a kidney removed two years ago after doctors discovered he was suffering from cancer.
   Last month the disease was detected in his second kidney, and he was successfully operated on in Mumbai.
   Geelani has opposed talks between moderate separatists and New Delhi over the fate of the Himalayan state, which is divided by a heavily militarised ceasefire line between India and Pakistan.
   Supporters chanted ‘long live Geelani’ and ‘Geelani lead us, we will follow you’ as he emerged from Srinagar’s high-security airport.
   Geelani was driven straight to a graveyard in Srinagar, where an estimated 35,000 people had gathered.
   ‘We will take the ongoing struggle to its logical end. We will not allow any sellout,’ Geelani told the crowd after offering prayers for the militants, separatists and civilians buried there.

Newly-wed Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai on Sunday sought blessings of Lord Venkateshwara at the famous hill shrine at Tirumala near Tirupati, reports PTI.
   The Bollywood stars, who entered wedlock on Friday, were in the sanctum sanctorum for about ten minutes, temple sources said.
   Abhishek’s father Amitabh Bachahan, mother Jaya Bachchan, noted industrialist Anil Ambani and his wife Tina accompanied the couple.
   During their stay at the shire, the priests chanted prayers and offered them the celestial ghee lamp arathi the sources said.
   Later, chief priest Sri Ramana Dikshithulu showered ‘divine blessings’ upon the couple at the Sri Ranganayaka Mandapa in the temple.
   Meanwhile, a photojournalist of a Mumbai-based newspaper fell unconscious after being kicked in the abdomen by security guards outside the Bachchan residence Prateeksha, on Saturday night. BL Soni, the journalist, had to be rushed to Aryogya Nidhi Hospital at Juhu, where his condition is said to be stable.

The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has said Tokyo feels ‘responsible’ for forcing women to work in brothels during Second World War, Newsweek magazine has reported.
   Abe’s remark appears to be an effort to deflect US criticism over comments he made last month that there was no proof the government or the military had forced the women, mostly Asian and many Korean, to serve Japanese soldiers in the brothels.
   ‘We feel responsible for having forced these women to go through that hardship and pain as comfort women under the circumstances at the time,’ Abe was quoted as saying in the interview.
   Abe also expressed sympathy for the ‘comfort women,’ and reiterated that his administration stood by a 1993 Japanese statement that acknowledged official involvement in the management of the brothels.

Japan is considering asking Washington to lift a current ban on exporting US stealth fighters so it can buy the high-tech aircraft, a press report said Sunday.
   The defence ministry may want the radar-evading F-22As after acquiring cheaper upgraded F-15FX fighters, Kyodo News reported.
   These fighters would replace Japan’s ageing fleet of F-4s to be scrapped beginning in April 2008, the report said, quoting sources close to the matter.
   The acquisition of the state-of-the-art fighters is aimed at boosting Japan’s air defence in the face of North Korea’s nuclear arms threat and improving joint operations with the US air force, it said.

A homemade bomb blew up three video and music shops in a market in northwest Pakistan where hardliners believe the businesses are un-Islamic, the police said Sunday.
   The blast happened late Saturday in Swabi, about 100 kilometers northeast of Peshawar, the capital of the deeply conservative North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, they said.
   ‘It destroyed one shop and partially damaged two others, but there were no casualties as the market was closed,’ local police chief Fazal Elahi Badshah said.
   The blast occurred in the Gulzada Market which has some 80 shops of CDs, DVDs, tape recorders and also houses groups of bands usually hired to perform in wedding ceremonies, residents said.

A former Philippine army colonel and self-confessed ‘resident adviser’ on failed coup plots, looks set to win a place on the government’s senatorial slate for next month’s mid-term elections, a media report said Sunday.
   Gregorio ‘Gringo’ Honasan, 59, was released from detention Friday after posting bail on charges of masterminding a failed February 2006 coup against president Gloria Arroyo.
   According to a report in the Philippine Star, Honasan looks set to replace ‘one of the weakest candidates’ on the administration’s Team Unity senatorial slate.
   Former presidential chief of staff Michael Defensor was quoted as saying he was ‘open’ to the idea of Honasan replacing one of the candidates, without elaborating.

Two bomb blasts killed 11 people in Afghanistan’s eastern city of Khost Sunday, while five rebels and a policeman died in a battle elsewhere, officials said.
   The deadliest explosion was caused by a suicide bomber, wearing police uniform and riding a motorcycle, who detonated his explosives in a busy meat market in Khost, provincial deputy intelligence director Mira Jan said.
   At least 10 people were killed, most of them civilians, provincial public health director Gul Mohammad Mohammadi said. More than 40 were wounded, four of whom were in a coma, he said.
   The police immediately sealed off the crowded area, said an AFP reporter behind the cordon. Ambulances and police vehicles carried away bodies.
   Security officials had been on the lookout for an attacker since Saturday, Jan said.

Nigeria’s presidential election was so badly flawed that it should be cancelled and held again, the biggest local election observer group said on Sunday.
   ‘We are going to call for a rerun of elections. You cannot use the result from half of the country to announce a new president,’ Innocent Chukwuma, chairman of the Transition Monitoring Group, told Reuters.
   He said the official electoral commission had not been prepared for Saturday’s vote.
   ‘In many parts of the country elections did not start on time or did not start at all,’ Chukwuma said.
   The election was marred by violence, intimidation and fraud, a far cry from the credible democratic vote many had hoped would usher in the first handover from one civilian president to another since Nigerian independence from Britain in 1960.
   European Union observers have also expressed concern about Saturday’s vote, saying they had witnessed violence, ballot stuffing and a big shortfall in voting slips.
    ‘For now the assessment is outspokenly negative — I’m very concerned,’ Max van den Berg, head of the EU mission, told journalists in Kaduna.
   He said the mission had not seen the massive improvement it had asked for following harshly-criticised elections for state governors and assemblies last weekend.
   Polling stations in some areas did not open until just before the closing time of 5:00pm.
   First results emerging in the northwestern state of Sokoto on Sunday showed the ruling People’s Democratic Party ahead, as is widely expected across the country.
   
   Opposition protest over vote
   The Nigerian opposition quickly protested over the country’s historic presidential election which was marked by ballot box chaos, killings and a truck-bomb aimed at the electoral commission headquarters.
   The vice president, Atiku Abubakar, one of three front-runners in the race to take over from President Olusegun Obasanjo, described the vote as ‘a national tragedy’ marked by ‘intimidation, fraud and low participation.’
   Obasanjo pledged after casting his vote there would be no dirty tricks.
   ‘I want to assure Nigerians that this government is a law abiding government. It has no reason to tamper with the results of elections,’ he said in his native Abeokuta, in the southwest of the country.
   There are three frontrunners in the race to replace Obasanjo. All are northerners: Umaru Yar’Adua of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, Abubakar, who defected from the PDP to run for the opposition Action Congress, and former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari.
   The ballot paper mayhem was partly caused by a Supreme Court decision this week to allow Abubakar, who is facing corruption allegations, to run in the election, overruling his disqualification by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

Insurgents slaughtered another 47 Iraqis on Sunday, including 23 members of a small religious minority dragged from a bus and gunned down by the roadside, security officials said.
   The latest day of carnage came as the US military said it would press on with plans to wall in Baghdad’s worst neighbourhoods despite criticism from residents and many Iraqi leaders.
   An American commander also announced plans to recruit more than 40,000 new troops into Iraq’s armed forces in 2007 as part of a 14-billion-dollar plan for developing the war-torn country’s security forces.
   Unidentified gunmen dragged 23 members of northern Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority from a bus and shot them dead by the roadside, said police brigadier general Mohammed el-Waqa’a.
   ‘Workers were travelling back from a textile plant in Mosul to their home in Bashika, east of the city,’ he said. ‘Several gunmen stopped the buses, chose the Yazidi among the passengers and killed them in front of everybody.’
   In Baghdad two car bomb explosions at a police station killed 16 people and wounded 95 others, security officials said.
   Meanwhile, insurgents killed three more US soldiers in and around Baghdad, taking to 58 the military's losses for this month alone, the military reported Sunday.

Strides in understanding human brain chemistry and genetics are giving scientists hope they may be able to defuse violent behaviour to avoid tragedies like last week’s university massacre in Virginia, neurologists say.
   The shooter, a 23-year-old South Korean who had lived in the United States since he was a child, killed 32 people before committing suicide, in the deadliest school shooting in US history.
   ‘There is no doubt in my mind that if we could have examined his brain (the killer at Virginia Tech) we would have found anomalies, and we would have been able to suggest for him to get therapies,’ said Dr. Allan Siegel, a neurologist and researcher at the University of Medicine of New Jersey. ‘We might have been able to avoid this — if he had been treated properly in the hospital setting,’ Siegel said. Clinical research as well as animal testing, particularly on cats, over some 40 years has shown that there are specific zones in the brain linked to aggression and violence, he said.

Iran’s foreign minister said on Saturday the UN Security Council, which has passed two sanctions resolutions on Iran since December, had no right to stop it enriching uranium.
   Iran has been upping the ante in a standoff with the Security Council, which has demanded a halt to enrichment over fears Tehran is seeking to build nuclear bombs.
   ‘We don’t accept Iran’s case being passed from the
   International Atomic Energy Agency to the UN Security Council,’ Manouchehr Mottaki said through an interpreter at a news conference while visiting Nicaragua.
   ‘The Security Council has no right to take this right away from the people,’ he said, referring to Iran’s enrichment of uranium.
   Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil exporter, says it wants the fuel for generating electricity and to allow it to export more of its valuable oil and gas.

Venezuela will ask the United Nations to investigate why the US has failed to prosecute or extradite Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles on charges he masterminded the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, a lawyer for the Venezuelan government said Friday.
   Venezuela also plans to appeal to the Organisation of American States and challenge the US government’s actions in international courts after the 79-year-old posted bail and was freed from jail on Thursday, lawyer Jose Pertierra told The Associated Press. Posada is awaiting trial in the US on immigration fraud charges.
   In Cuba, relatives of the 73 people killed in the bombing off Barbados held a vigil in front of a US mission, while the government accused the White House of arranging Posada’s release to cover up past CIA secrets. President Hugo Chavez’s government made an extradition request for the US to hand over Posada nearly two years ago to be tried for the bombing, allegedly planned in Caracas.
   ‘Venezuela is looking to approach governments and people through this hemisphere and around the world to jointly ask the United Nations — to investigate through hearings the conduct of the United States in the last almost two years in the way it has proceeded to protect this terrorist,’ Pertierra said.

Attacks by the public against Saudi Arabia’s religious police, who are in charge of enforcing a strict Islamic moral code in the conservative kingdom, are on the rise, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
   Last year saw an increase in violence against the 5,000-plus members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, who came under more than 21 attacks, Al-Watan said without giving figures for previous years.
   The newspaper partly attributed the different views over the role of the religious police, commonly known as Muttawa, to the changes undergone by society since the force was founded several decades ago.
   Members of the public who spoke to the daily also cited the fact that the religious police are involved in sensitive private matters.
   They sometimes suspect people of unethical behaviour when they are in fact acting in accordance with Islamic tenets, leading to embarrassing or humiliating situations, the paper reported.